Some thoughts on Web Anonymity

We live in a stalker-friendly world what with people over-sharing more and more on social networking sites; it used to be that if a person wanted to find out what someone was up to they had to go through their garbage, stalk them for absolute ages to get an idea of what was going on or intercept their mail. Nowadays Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other applications and sites allow people to broadcast their every move.

Our movements through the web leave tracks via cookies (Cookies are pieces of personal data stored when users browse the web, sometimes to power advertising) that companies use to build profiles for targeted advertising. Google is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to targeted adverts through users search habits and Gmail keyword scanning.

EU regulations have made it easier for end users to see what cookies are being saved on their computers – some for ease of use but others to monitor what people look at so they can be targeted for online sales.

Add to this the revelations of what the NSA and GCHQ have been up to with spying ononlinecommunications and previously unknown acronyms (PRISM) becoming public knowledge it has made me feel less than secure online.

Staying (relatively) anonymous online

I have been aware of The Onion Router (TOR) for ages and have even played with it for a while – it is a cross-platform program and works on Windows, OSX and Linux operating systems. There are even Android & iPhone apps that allow secure mobile browsing.
While it is true that TOR will slow your online activities a bit, it does make your web use more secure as long as you know what you are doing when you use it! The founder of The Silk Road learned this to his cost when he was arrested.

A lot has been said about how TOR allows criminals to get away with crime but it also allows political dissidents and journalists to communicate privately to avoid arrest or being disappeared.

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (their own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in their own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, and Bing. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Their long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form.

You can also use a Linux-based system such as TAILS – a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer’s original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux.